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Living Under the Adversary's Rules, part two

We are living through astounding times now.

The figure of Antichrist masquerading as "Pope Francis" will be arriving in Fatima, Portgual, today, Friday, May 12, 2017, the Feast of Saints Nereus, Achilleus, Domitilla and Pancratius, to begin a two-day effort to deconstuct and misrepresent Our Lady's Fatima Message on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of her first apparition to Jacinta and Francisco Marto and their cousin, Lucia dos Santos, in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal. Bergoglio has blasphemed Our Lady on many occasions. (Please seeBlessed Among Women: Defending the Sublime Privileges of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is available for purchase at the Create Space Bookstore. The bookis also available at Amazon and in a Kindleedition..) Yet it is that he will present himself as her devoted son in Fatima, the very place where she warned the three shepherd chidren about the errors of Russia that he himself endorses and propagates.

Meanwhile, the errors of Russia, which will be enumerated once again in the commentary to be published on Sunday, May 14, 2017, the Fourth Sunday after Easter and the Commmoration of Saint Boniface the Martyr (not the Apostle of Germany, whose feast this year is suppressed because it falls on Whit Tuesday), continue to be on full display here in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world.

We have a president of the United States of America, Donald John Trump, who is completely impetuous and is obsessed with what his critics are saying about him. He has become the best friend that his advesaries in the false opposite of the naturalist "left" could have ever conjured up as he plays directly into their efforts to effect a "deep state" coup d'etat to throw him out of the White House. Side show after side show keeps everyone agitated while grave evils, especially the daily slaughter of the innocent preborn by chemical and surgical means under the cover of the civil--as well as by the spread of wanton perversity and licentiousness as a matter of "freedom of conscience," continue unchecked.

This calls to mind a prophecy of the Venerable Marie Julie-Jahenny, who lived from February 12, 1850, to March 4, 1941, concerning the fate of what she called the "island nation," which is how she referred to the United States of America. The quotation below was sent by one who is in direct contact with an exerpt on the Venerable Marie Julie-Jahenny in France and has studied all of her writings, many of which have not been published or translated into English:

“After the important island nation has a black president it will be the last president and the country will disintegrate. After many, many years, it will return, but never ever the same.” (Marie Julie-Jahenny)

I have refrained from using this quotation for several months now. However, its inclusion in this commentary seems more than warraned by recent developments in the farce of naturalism unfolding before our eyes in the nation's capital as two supposed competing sets of naturalists, each of whose members are heavily funded and controlled by Talmudists of one stripe or another, join together to rid themselves of a man who is as bereft of any understanding of constitutional principles as they are of any respect for such principles. They are united also in their adherence to some kind of Judeo-Masonic naturalism regardless of the specific differences that they claim to distnguish them from each other. It is to be in league with the devil, whether wittingly or unwittingly, to believe that men can know social order absent obedience to the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law as they have been entrused to the infallible explication of Holy Mother Church and absent a firm reliance upon her sanctifying offices to make it possible for them to sanctify and save their souls. Order in the soul is the precondition of order in society, and Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

Conversely, of course, disorder in the soul leads to disorder in society. Only the willfully blind can refuse to see and admit that there is hardly anyone in public life who does not suffer from grave disorders of the soul, which helps to perpetuate disorders in the world at an increasingly faster rate.

Let's face facts.

Donald John Trump has lived his entire adult life, objectively speaking without for one moment making any judgments about his subjective culpability steeped in grave sins. This is why he has no intellectual consistency and is prone to say different things at different times. His loyalty is to Donald John Trump, not to any kind of principle, whether of the "left" or of the "right." He has no clue that he will have to render of his life to Christ the King at the moment of his Particular Judgment, not that he has heard that there is such a judgment.

To be sure, Trump's nefarous predecessor, Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro, has himself been at war with the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law throughout his adult life and has been completely amoral in the lies that he tells and in the support that he has given to grave moral evils. Obama/Soetoro is as ignorant as Trump is about First and Last Things, including, of course, the fact that he will face Christ the King when he dies. And what is true of Trump and Obama/Soetoro is true also of almost everyone else in public life. Needless division and conflict must occur when men are not united under the banner of Christ the King as it must be lifted high by its holy standard-bearer, Holy Mother Church.

As noted so many times before on this site, the adversary wants people to be divided needlessly along the lines of being for or against a particular political "savior" or a particular political party or a particular set of naturalistic ideologies or philosophies. Lost in all of this needless division and conflict is the simple fact that the members of the false opposites of the naturalist "left" and "right" are united as one in their belief that there is no place for Christ the King in matters of politics and public policy. This is the triump of Judeo-Masonic naturalism.

Pope Leo XIII explained to us that we must not be distracted by who is or is not a formal member of Masonic lodges. What matters is that most people in public life, including most Catholics, have Judeo-Masonic beliefs even if they do not realize that this is so:

For, from what We have above most clearly shown, that which is their ultimate purpose forces itself into view -- namely, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere naturalism.

What We have said, and are about to say, must be understood of the sect of the Freemasons taken generically, and in so far as it comprises the associations kindred to it and confederated with it, but not of the individual members of them. There may be persons amongst these, and not a few who, although not free from the guilt of having entangled themselves in such associations, yet are neither themselves partners in their criminal acts nor aware of the ultimate object which they are endeavoring to attain. In the same way, some of the affiliated societies, perhaps, by no means approve of the extreme conclusions which they would, if consistent, embrace as necessarily following from their common principles, did not their very foulness strike them with horror. Some of these, again, are led by circumstances of times and places either to aim at smaller things than the others usually attempt or than they themselves would wish to attempt. They are not, however, for this reason, to be reckoned as alien to the masonic federation; for the masonic federation is to be judged not so much by the things which it has done, or brought to completion, as by the sum of its pronounced opinions. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.)

Yes, it is the sum of the "pronounced opinions" of Judeo-Masonry that matters, not any specific program or line of action, although there have been programs and lines of action (the establishment of public schools and the mandating of curricula of study, legislation liberalizing divorce, attempts at imposing laws forbidding the wearing of clerical garb in public and of the operation of parochial schools, the promotion of contraception and abortion, the rapid “normalization” of civil “marriage” for those engaged in perverse acts against nature, all other manner of licentiousness in civil law and public culture) that members of the lodges have undertaken over the course of this nation's history that were meant to be detrimental to the Faith. The Judeo-Masonic spirit convinces even believing Catholics that the social encyclical letters of our true popes don't apply to the United States of America, and that simple statements of Catholic truth, including the one below from Pope Saint Pius X's Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910, have been made "obsolete" over the course of time:

For there is no true civilization without a moral civilization, and no true moral civilization without the true religion: it is a proven truth, a historical fact. (Pope Saint Pius X, Notre Charge Apostolique, August 15, 1910.)

Some Americanist Catholics have been so bold over the years as to assert that the Church has no business at all in pronouncing that she has universal principles for the governance of men and their nations that are binding upon the consciences of all men at all times, thus showing themselves to defect from the Faith by refusing to accept these plain words of Pope Pius XII in Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958:

Assuming false and unjust premises, they are not afraid to take a position which would confine within a narrow scope the supreme teaching authority of the Church, claiming that there are certain questions -- such as those which concern social and economic matters -- in which Catholics may ignore the teachings and the directives of this Apostolic See.

This opinion -- it seems entirely unnecessary to demonstrate its existence -- is utterly false and full of error because, as We declared a few years ago to a special meeting of Our Venerable Brethren in the episcopacy:

"The power of the Church is in no sense limited to so-called 'strictly religious matters'; but the whole matter of the natural law, its institution, interpretation and application, in so far as the moral aspect is concerned, are within its power.

"By God's appointment the observance of the natural law concerns the way by which man must strive toward his supernatural end. The Church shows the way and is the guide and guardian of men with respect to their supernatural end."

This truth had already been wisely explained by Our Predecessor St. Pius X in his Encyclical Letter Singulari quadam of September 24, 1912, in which he made this statement: "All actions of a Christian man so far as they are morally either good or bad -- that is, so far as they agree with or are contrary to the natural and divine law -- fall under the judgment and jurisdiction of the Church." (Pope Pius XII, Ad Apostolorum Principis, June 29, 1958.)

Pope Pius XII was condemning the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association's (the rump "church" created by the Red Chinese government that was more or less recognized in ade facto manner by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's letter to Chinese Catholics in 2007 that was reiterated in 2009; see Red China: Workshop for the New Ecclesiology) rejection of the authority of the Catholic Church in matters of social and economic matters. His condemnation applies just as much to anyone else, including Americanist Catholics, who reject the Social Reign of Christ the King and the authority of the Catholic Church to enunciate the moral principles that must guide governance and economics. No naturalist philosophy or program takes place of the Deposit of Faith that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ has entrusted exclusively to the Catholic Church that He Himself created upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope, for its infallible explication and eternal safekeeping.

Alas, the Modern world is founded in a rejection of this simple truth. "Hope" is then to be placed in all manner of naturalists, whether they be of the "Enlightenment" or of the American founding or the French Revolution or Marxism-Leninism or any of the dozens of others of ideologies and "philosophies" claiming the ability to "improve" the world by means of the naturalistic formulae of Judeo-Masonry, many of which are embraced by various false religions, including that of the counterfeit church of conciliarism, as worthy of at least some respect in the practicalities of the "real" world. This is precisely the goal of the Judeo-Masonic spirit that Pope Leo XIII explicated in Humanum Genus:

But the naturalists go much further; for, having, in the highest things, entered upon a wholly erroneous course, they are carried headlong to extremes, either by reason of the weakness of human nature, or because God inflicts upon them the just punishment of their pride. Hence it happens that they no longer consider as certain and permanent those things which are fully understood by the natural light of reason, such as certainly are -- the existence of God, the immaterial nature of the human soul, and its immortality. The sect of the Freemasons, by a similar course of error, is exposed to these same dangers; for, although in a general way they may profess the existence of God, they themselves are witnesses that they do not all maintain this truth with the full assent of the mind or with a firm conviction. Neither do they conceal that this question about God is the greatest source and cause of discords among them; in fact, it is certain that a considerable contention about this same subject has existed among them very lately. But, indeed, the sect allows great liberty to its votaries, so that to each side is given the right to defend its own opinion, either that there is a God, or that there is none; and those who obstinately contend that there is no God are as easily initiated as those who contend that God exists, though, like the pantheists, they have false notions concerning Him: all which is nothing else than taking away the reality, while retaining some absurd representation of the divine nature.

When this greatest fundamental truth has been overturned or weakened, it follows that those truths, also, which are known by the teaching of nature must begin to fall -- namely, that all things were made by the free will of God the Creator; that the world is governed by Providence; that souls do not die; that to this life of men upon the earth there will succeed another and an everlasting life.

When these truths are done away with, which are as the principles of nature and important for knowledge and for practical use, it is easy to see what will become of both public and private morality. We say nothing of those more heavenly virtues, which no one can exercise or even acquire without a special gift and grace of God; of which necessarily no trace can be found in those who reject as unknown the redemption of mankind, the grace of God, the sacraments, and the happiness to be obtained in heaven. We speak now of the duties which have their origin in natural probity. That God is the Creator of the world and its provident Ruler; that the eternal law commands the natural order to be maintained, and forbids that it be disturbed; that the last end of men is a destiny far above human things and beyond this sojourning upon the earth: these are the sources and these the principles of all justice and morality.

If these be taken away, as the naturalists and Freemasons desire, there will immediately be no knowledge as to what constitutes justice and injustice, or upon what principle morality is founded. And, in truth, the teaching of morality which alone finds favor with the sect of Freemasons, and in which they contend that youth should be instructed, is that which they call "civil," and "independent," and "free," namely, that which does not contain any religious belief. But, how insufficient such teaching is, how wanting in soundness, and how easily moved by every impulse of passion, is sufficiently proved by its sad fruits, which have already begun to appear. For, wherever, by removing Christian education, this teaching has begun more completely to rule, there goodness and integrity of morals have begun quickly to perish, monstrous and shameful opinions have grown up, and the audacity of evil deeds has risen to a high degree. All this is commonly complained of and deplored; and not a few of those who by no means wish to do so are compelled by abundant evidence to give not infrequently the same testimony. (Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus, April 20, 1884.)

Yes, there is no “knowledge” of what constitutes justice and injustice in a land that gives full rein to blasphemy and sacrilege, a land where even the adversary himself has “rights” as it is considered to be something akin to a “hate” crime to mention the Holy Name of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, which has been banned by United States Department of Defense and its military services from being invoked outside of chaplaincy use.

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when their nations promote public worship of the devil while mocking Christ the King?

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when the civil law sanctions the killing of the innocent preborn and the vivisection of anyone after birth under the aegis of the medical industry’s manufactured, profit-making myth called “brain death”?

How can we expect there to be any concept of justice even on the natural level when so many people are unjust in their own personal dealings, when relativism and positivism have become the accepted norms of social conduct?

As has been noted before on this site, we are called by the binding precepts of the Fourth Commandment and of the Natural Law itself to love our country. Authentic love of one's nation, however, wills her good, the ultimate expression of which is her Catholicization, that is, the subordination of everything in her national life to that which redounds to the good of the souls of her citizens as that good as been entrusted to and defined by the one and only true Church, the Catholic Church that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. One who recognizes this immutable truth of the Catholic Faith can see quite readily that is a day of reparation, not of celebration. Most Catholics alive today have never heard that this is, no less understand anything about it, and this is true of Catholics in the United States of America because of Americanism and its embrace of religious liberty and this is true universally because of the "Second" Vatican Council

The "Second" Vatican Council was certainly influenced by a number of different social and Modernist theological currents in Europe. However, its view of the civil state and of the place of the true Faith comes in large measure from Americanism and "religious liberty," something that Alfred Cardinal Ottaviani, who ran the Holy Office during the pontificate of Pope Pius XII, noted in 1954 by way of refuting an American Jesuit, Father John Courtney Murray, who championed "religious liberty" as an example of "understanding" Catholic teaching in light of "changed circumstances" and the needs of "modern" man:

Here the problem presents itself of how the Church and the lay state are to live together. Some Catholics are propagating ideas with regard to this point which are not quite correct. Many of these Catholics undoubtedly love the Church and rightly intend to find a mode of possible adaptation to the circumstances of the times.But it is none the less true that their position reminds one of that of the faint-hearted soldier who wants to conquer without fighting, or of that of the simple, unsuspecting person who accepts a hand, treacherously held out to him, without taking account of the fact that this hand will subsequently pull him across the Rubicon towards error and injustice.

The first mistake of these people is precisely that of not accepting fully the "arms of truth" and the teaching which the Roman Pontiffs, in the course of this last century, and in particular the reigning Pontiff, Pius XII, by means of encyclicals, allocutions and instructions of all kinds, have given to Catholics on this subject.

To justify themselves, these people affirm that, in the body of teaching given in the Church, a distinction must be made between what is permanent and what is transitory, this latter being due to the influence of particular passing conditions. Unfortunately, however, they include in this second zone the principles laid down in the Pontifical documents, principles on which the teaching of the Church has remained constant, as they form part of the patrimony of Catholic doctrine.

In this matter, the pendulum theory, elaborated by certain writers in an attempt to sift the teaching set forth in Encyclical Letters at different times, cannot be applied. "The Church," it has been written, "takes account of the rhythm of the world's history after the fashion of a swinging pendulum which, desirous of keeping the proper measure, maintains its movement by reversing it when it judges that it has gone as far as it should.... From this point of view a whole history of the Encyclicals could be written. Thus in the field of Biblical studies, the Encyclical, Divino Afflante Spiritu, comes after the Encyclicals Spiritus Paraclitus and Providentissimus. In the field of Theology or Politics, the Encyclicals, Summi Pontificatus, Non abbiamo bisogno and Ubi Arcano Deo, come after the Encyclical, Immortale Dei."

Now if this were to be understood in the sense that the general and fundamental principles of public Ecclesiastical Law, solemnly affirmed in the Encyclical Letter, Immortale Dei, are merely the reflection of historic moments of the past, while the swing of the pendulum of the doctrinal Encyclicals of Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII has passed in the opposite direction to different positions,the statement would have to be qualified as completely erroneous, not only because it misrepresents the teaching of the Encyclicals themselves, but also because it is theoretically inadmissible. In the Encyclical Letter, Humani Generis, the reigning Pontiff teaches us that we must recognize in the Encyclicals the ordinary magisterium of the Church: "Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand assent, in that, when writing such Letters, the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their teaching authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say "He who heareth you heareth Me" (St. Luke 10:16); and generally what is expounded and inculcated in Encyclical Letters already belongs for other reasons to Catholic doctrine."

Because they are afraid of being accused of wanting to return to the Middle Ages,some of our writers no longer dare to maintain the doctrinal positions that are constantly affirmed in the Encyclicals as belonging to the life and legislation of the Church in all ages. For them is meant the warning of Pope Leo XIII who, recommending concord and unity in the combat against error, adds that "care must be taken never to connive, in anyway, at false opinions, never to withstand them less strenuously than truth allows." (Duties of the Catholic State in Regard to Religion.)

Let me reiterate one paragraph from the excerpt taken from Cardinal Ottaviani's essay):

To justify themselves, these people affirm that, in the body of teaching given in the Church, a distinction must be made between what is permanent and what is transitory, this latter being due to the influence of particular passing conditions. Unfortunately, however, they include in this second zone the principles laid down in the Pontifical documents, principles on which the teaching of the Church has remained constant, as they form part of the patrimony of Catholic doctrine.

John Courtney Murray, however, was simply carrying on the pioneering Americanist spirit of Archbishop John Ireland's sermon preached in the Cathedral of Mary our Queen in Baltimore Maryland, on October 18, 1893, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the episcopal consecration of James Cardinal Gibbons, Ireland's co-conspirator in the creation of a new "faith," American Catholicism, which served as one of the prototypes for the "new faith" and the "new theology" and the "new liturgy" and the "new way of 'defining' doctrine" provided to "humanity" and the "age" by the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

The following very substantial excerpt from John Ireland's sermon, which must have gone on for two hours given its extraordinary length in written form, demonstrates the "spirit" of the "Second" Vatican Council took shape right here in the United States of America in the Nineteenth Century as Catholics were taught about and "progress" and "reconciliation with the age." A careful reading of the excerpt that follows, which contains emphases supplied by this writer, will reveal key points of similarity between Americanism and concilairism and thus the chaos of our own times:

Most Eminent Cardinal - Brethren of the Clergy and of the Laity:Twenty-five years in exalted office, a bishop, a chieftain of bishops, in the Catholic Church, in America, in the latter days of this nineteenth century of the Christian era! Great the opportunities and weighty the responsibilities.

Of those years what record should I, who revere and love the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, fain have to write? Should it be that they went by without harm done or good prevented, without blemish or reproach? This, whatever its value along the dark lines of frail humanity, is, at best, but the story of the talent wrapped up in napkin folds and securely guarded from misuse. Not this record did Christ expect from apostles, and from this pulpit I will not speak it.

Should the record be that of common duties performed in zeal and loyalty, of useful ministry in blessing and ordaining, in building temples and asylums, in exhorting souls unto their salvation? This record would be that of the ten hundred; it merits no special praise; it teaches no special lesson, and it shall not be the theme of this evening.

The Common! We are surfeited with it.

Let others tell of the many. I wish to tell of the few. I am tired of the common; I am angry with it. If I am myself compelled to plod over its wearying pathways, I want, at least, to see others shun them, to see men rise far above their singular thoughts and singular deeds freshen human life and give it power to place itself in those high altitudes wherein is born progress. The common never puts humanity forward, never begets a great movement; nor does it save humanity when grave peril comes upon it. The common! We are surfeited with it; it have made our souls torpid and our limbs rigid. Under the guise of goodness it is a curse. The want in the world, the want in the Church, to-day as at other times, to-day as never before, is of men among men, of men who see further than others, rise higher than others, act more boldly than others. They need not be numerous. The never were numerous. But, while the few, they take with them the multitude and save humanity. The one man of sufficient grandeur of soul and firmness of hand saves a whole country; the one man saves the whole Church.

This evening it is my coveted privilege to honor a man among men. The record of the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore! I speak it with pride and exultation; it is the record I should have traced for my ideal bishop and leader of men in these solemn times through which the Church is passing.

The New Era Has Come: The Church Needs to Adapt Herself To It

The times are solemn. In no epoch of history, since the beginning of the Christian era, did changes so profound and so far-reaching occur.There is in the physical sphere of human activity a complete revolution. Discoveries and inventions have opened to us a new material world. Social and political conditions have been transformed. Intellectual curiosity is intense and peers with keenest eye into the recesses of sky and earth. Intellectual ambition, maddened by wondrous successes in many fields, puts on daring pinions and challenges all limitations of knowledge. The human heart is emboldened to the strangest dreams and frets itself into desperate efforts in presence of all barriers to the completion of its desires. Let things be new, is the watchword of the present humanity, and to make things new is its strong resolve. To this end are pledged its most fierce activities, which, in whatever part of man’s realm they are exercised, have their illustration in the stream and electricity of the new material creation.

In the midst of these times the Catholic Church moves and works, professing, as her charter obliges her, to conquer minds and hearts, individuals and society. Her mission to the world is what it was for long centuries: but the world wears a new aspect. The Church sails upon the waters of the same ocean upon whose bosom she has glided since her first departure from Palestine: but the new winds trouble those waters and toss them into unusual billows. No long argument is needed to show that there ought to be new movements of the helm in the Ship of State and new unfurlings of canvas from her masts.

Now is the opportunity for great and singular men among the sons of God’s Church. To-day old-time routine is fatal; to-day the common is worn-out senility. The crisis demands the new, the extraordinary, and with it the Catholic Church will score the grandest of her victories in the grandest of history’s ages.

Oh, just an interjection here. What was it that I wrote over four years ago in Modernism Repackaged as Newness? Something about "new," wasn't it? Yes, I believe so. Jorge Mario Bergoglio wants "newness," which means he wants to recycle old heresies.

Back to John Ireland, thank you very much:

There Is A Discord Between Age and Church. Where the Fault Lies

“There is a discord between the age and the Church.” I recall the fact with sorrow. The interests of society and of religion suffer, while misunderstanding and separation last. The peace of harmony is the price of well-being and of progress.

The fault lies with the age and with the Church, or rather with spokesmen of the age and spokesmen of the Church. Age and Church, rightly apprehended, are in no manner at war. The age, as it is represented to us, is at fault. Elated with its material and intellectual successes, it is proud and exaggerates its powers. It imagines that the natural, which has served it so well, is all sufficient; it tends to the exclusion of the supernatural; it puts on the cloak of secularism. In it worship of the new, which the march of progress brings to it, whatever is old is suspected. It asks why its church may not be new as well as its chemistry or its science of mechanics. A church bearing on her front the marks of nineteen centuries is in its eyes out of date and out of place. Pride and thoughtlessness are the evil and misleading characteristics of the age.

The Church, as she comes before us in the speech and actions of churchmen, deserves her share of reproach. I speak as a Catholic with sincere love for the Catholic Church. I know the divine elements in the Church which Christ has made the repository of truth and grace, and I have full faith that those elements are at all times guarded under the unerring breathings of of the Holy Spirit. But I know, too, the human elements in the Church. Men in the Church retain their human parts, and upon their wisdom and their energy very much of the Church’s outward weal is made dependent. The Church has had her epochs, differing one from another in light and glory, as Catholic pastors and Catholic people scanned the world with clearer sight and unsheathed the spiritual sword with greater alacrity. The dependence of the Church upon her human elements is often too easily forgotten although the Church herself authoritatively teaches that undue reliance upon divine grace is a sin of presumption.

The Mistakes Of Churchmen In Not Seeking To Conciliate The Age

I am not afraid to say that, during the century whose sun is now setting, men in the Church have made the mistake of being to too slow to understand the new age and too slow to extend toward it the conciliatory hand of friendship. They were not without their excuses, the strength of which I respect. The Church in her divine elements is unchangeable, supremely conservative. Her dread of change, so righteous is a degree, is likely to be carried beyond the legitimate frontier and made to cover ground where change is proper. The existence under most inauspicious and repellent form. The revolution of 1789 whose waters, rushing and destructive as those of the maddest mountain torrent, were created with the crimson of blood, was the loud signal of the birth of the new era. The standard-bearers of the age often bore aloft the insignia of impiety and of social anarchy. Certain men, as Lamennais, who attempted, an alliance between the age and the Church, were imprudent in speech, and in their impatience they courted failure for themselves and discouragement for their allies. But with all these excuses churchmen thought and acted too slowly. They failed to grasp the age, to Christianize its aspirations and to guide its forward march; it passed beyond them. There were the few Lacordaires, who recognized and proclaimed the duties of the hour; timid companions abandoned them; reactionaries accused them of dangerous liberalism, of semi-heresy, and they were forced to be silent. The many saw but the vices of the age, which they readily anathematized; its good and noble tendencies they ignore and denied. The age was for them the dark world against which Christ has warned his followers. The task of winning it to the gospel was considered a forlorn hope. It was a task to be accomplished only through some stupendous miracle from heaven, and until the miracle came the ministers of Christ withdrew, as into winter quarters, into sacristies and sanctuaries, where surrounded by a small band of chosen ones, they could guard themselves and their friends from the all-pervading contagion. The age, abandoned to itself and to false and mischievous guides, estranged each year more and more from the Church on account of the Church’s isolation of her energies, irritated by her unfriendliness, became hardened in its secularism and taught itself to despise and hate religion. This deplorable condition prevailed in some countries more that in others; but from none was it totally absent. The Church had seemingly furled her flag of battle, her flag of victory.

The Opportunity For The Great And Singular Churchman.

It was a mistake and a misfortune. God and teach all nations, the Christ has said once for all times, and in obedience to these words the first apostles rushed into the roman Empire, speaking to the sages of Athens on Mars’ Hill, to the patricians and senators of Rome in the very courts of emperors, to the slaves in their huts, and the roman Empire was christianized. Radically, erring and evil-doing as the present age may have been, the methods and zeal of the early apostles would have won it to the Saviour. But, in veriest fact, the present age, pagan in its language and in the excesses of its qualities, is in its depths instinct with Christian emotions; it worships unwittingly at Christian shrines and awaits but the warm contact with the living Christian religion to avow itself Christian.

I indicate the opportunity for the great and singular churchman. His work is to bridge the deep valley separating the age from the Church, to clear off the clouds which prevent the one from seeing the realities of the other, to bring the Church to the age, and the age to the Church.

We must know that the age and the Church are not hopelessly apart.

The Bad And The Good In The Age

The age has, assuredly, its errors and its sins, and these the Church never can condone. With the age conceived as the embodiment of errors and sins the Church cannot be reconciled. But these are the accidents, not the essentials, in the make-up of the age. For my part, I see in the present age one of the mighty upheavals which occur from time to time in humanity, causing and marking the ascending stages in its continuous progress. Humanity strengthened by centuries of reflection and of toil, nourished and permeated by principles of Christian truth, is lifting upward its whole mass to higher regions of light and of liberty, and demanding a fuller and more universal enjoyment of its God-given rights. All this is praiseworthy; all this is beautiful and noble. It is all this that we are asked to accept when we accept the age, and in accepting the age we give ourselves the right the chide it for its defects–we put ourselves in a position to correct them.

Yes, yes, another brief interjection here. The sins of "the age" are indeed of its essence. They were in 1893 and continue to be now the direct consequence of the "age" of Protestantism and Judeo-Masonry, the "age" of concilairism's" official "reconciliation" with the principles of the "new era inaugurated in 1789." Gee, who was wrote about that "reconciliation" thirty-four years ago now? I got it:

Let us be content to say here that the text [of Gaudium et Spes] serves as a countersyllabus and, as such, represents on the part of the Church, an attempt at an official reconciliation with the new era inaugurated in 1789. Only from this perspective can we understand, on the one hand, the ghetto-mentality, of which we have spoken above; only from this perspective can we understand, on the other hand, the meaning of the remarkable meeting of the Church and the world. Basically, the word "world" means the spirit of the modern era, in contrast to which the Church's group-consciousness saw itself as a separate subject that now, after a war that had been in turn both hot and cold, was intent on dialogue and cooperation. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 382.)

Does this mean that the Council should be revoked? Certainly not. It means only that the real reception of the Council has not yet even begun. What devastated the Church in the decade after the Council was not the Council but the refusal to accept it. This becomes clear precisely in the history of the influence of Gaudium et spes. What was identified with the Council was, for the most part, the expression of an attitude that did not coincide with the statements to be found in the text itself, although it is recognizable as a tendency in its development and in some of its individual formulations. The task is not, therefore, to suppress the Council but to discover the real Council and to deepen its true intention in the light of the present experience. That means that there can be no return to the Syllabus, which may have marked the first stage in the confrontation with liberalism and a newly conceived Marxism but cannot be the last stage. In the long run, neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for Christians the problem of the modern world. The fact is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out as early as 1952, that the "demolition of the bastions" is a long-overdue task. (Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 391.)

There's a lot of invoking the spirit of John Ireland that's gone on in our times. And speaking of that deceased devil, let us return to his heretical screed:

The Invariable And the Variable; The Permanent And The Transient In The Church

The Church, too, has her accidents and her essentials. We must be able to distinguish the former from the latter; we must be prepared, while jealously guarding the essentials, to let got the accidents as circumstances of time and place require. What the church at any time was, certain people hold she ever must be. They do her much harm, making her rigid and unbending, incapable of adapting herself to new and changing surroundings. The Church, created by Christ for all ages, lives in every age and of every age. We find consequently, in her outward belongings the variable and the contingent. The Church, at one time imperialistic in her political alliances, was at another feudalistic; but she never committed herself in principle to imperialism or feudalism. She spoke Greek in Athens and Latin in Rome, and her sons wore the chlamys or the toga; but she was never an institution confined to Greece or to Italy. In later days she lisped the nascent languages of Goths and Franks, and showed in her steppings through their lands not a little of their uncultured bearing and of their defective civilization without being a Gothic or Frank product, limited in life and conditions to the life and conditions of her contemporaries. Her scientific knowledge at different epochs was scant as that of those epochs; her social legislation and customs, as their, were rude and tentative. She was simply in her human elements partaking of the life of her epochs, her divine elements always remaining the self-same, however shifting the mundane scenes around her. Two or three centuries ago, she was courtly and aristocratic under the temporal sway of the Fifth Charles of Spain or the Fourteenth Louis of France; but this again was a passing phase in her existence, and she may be at other times as democratic in her demeanor as the most earnest democracy would expect. Her canon law, which is the expression of her adaptability to circumstances, received the impress at one time of the Justinian code, at another that of the capitularies of Charlemagne, at another that of the Hapsburg or Bourbon edicts: but she was never mummified in Justinian or Bourbon moulds, and her canon law may be as American as it was Roman, as much the reflection of the twentieth century as it ever was of the middle ages. Were not all this most true the Church would not be catholic , as her founder was catholic, the teacher and Saviour of all ages and of all nations. Let us be as broad and as catholic in our conceptions of the Church as Christ was, and we shall find no difficulty in recognizing her fitness to all lands and to all ages–the past as well as the present, and the presents and the future as well as the past.

This a complete misrepresentation of the history of Holy Mother Church, she who lacks nothing in her Divine Constitution and who has raised to her altars civil potentates such as Saint Edward the Confessor, Saint Casimir, Saint Stephen of Hungary, Saint Wenceslaus of Bohemia, Saint Henry the Emperor, Saint Canute of Denmark and Saint Louis IX, King of France, among others. These monarchs ruled in behalf of the one and only Sovereign, Christ the King.

Sure, there were prelates who did the bidding of corrupt kings during the era of Christendom. So what? Americanist bishops and their conciliar successors have done the same thing in the United States of America as they have sought to make their own "reconciliation" with the spirit of the age. The bad example during Christendom was the result of fallen human nature. The accommodations in the United States of America made to statist politicians who support all manner of moral and social evils have been part and parcel of the Americanist approach to public policy by means of "dialogue" and "discussion," if not outright surrender.

No sale, John Ireland. No sale. We're not buying the self-serving misrepresentation of history that you're selling. No sale. While Holy Mother Church indeed has adapted herself to the specific conditions in which her children have found themselves in order to teach and sanctify them, she never concedes a thing to principles or practices that are opposed to Divine Revelation and thus to the temporal and eternal good of souls. No sale, Ireland. No sale.

Indeed, it should be remembered that a man who embodied the spirit of John Carroll and John Ireland and James Gibbons during his earliest seminary days in the 1940s made the same false "distinctions" between "permanent" and "transient" that Ireland did on October 18, 1893, and has made the numerous misrepresentations of history to justify his conciliar revolution:

In theses 10-12, the difficult problem of the relationship between language and thought is debated, which in post-conciliar discussions was the immediate departure point of the dispute.

The identity of the Christian substance as such, the Christian 'thing' was not directly ... censured, but it was pointed out that no formula, no matter how valid and indispensable it may have been in its time, can fully express the thought mentioned in it and declare it unequivocally forever, since language is constantly in movement and the content of its meaning changes. (Fr. Ratzinger: Dogmatic formulas must always change.)

The text [of the document Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation] also presents the various types of bonds that rise from the different degrees of magisterial teaching. It affirms - perhaps for the first time with this clarity - that there are decisions of the magisterium that cannot be the last word on the matter as such, but are, in a substantial fixation of the problem, above all an expression of pastoral prudence, a kind of provisional disposition. The nucleus remains valid, but the particulars, which the circumstances of the times influenced, may need further correction.

In this regard, one may think of the declarations of Popes in the last century [19th century] about religious liberty, as well as the anti-Modernist decisions at the beginning of this century, above all, the decisions of the Biblical Commission of the time [on evolutionism]. As a cry of alarm in the face of hasty and superficial adaptations, they will remain fully justified. A personage such as Johann Baptist Metz said, for example, that the Church's anti-Modernist decisions render the great service of preserving her from falling into the liberal-bourgeois world. But in the details of the determinations they contain, they became obsolete after having fulfilled their pastoral mission at their proper time. (Joseph Ratzinger, "Instruction on the Theologian's Ecclesial Vocation," published with the title "Rinnovato dialogo fra Magistero e Teologia," in L'Osservatore Romano, June 27, 1990, p. 6, cited at Card. Ratzinger: The teachings of the Popes against Modernism are obsolete)

It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church's decisions on contingent matters - for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible - should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.

What! the Church of the living God, the Church of ten thousand victories over pagans and barbarians, over false philosophies and heresies, over defiant kings and unruly peoples–the great, freedom-loving, philanthropic, truth-giving Catholic Church–this Church afraid of the nineteenth century! afraid of any century! not seeing in the nineteenth the fervent ebullitions of noblest sentiments, the germinations of her own Christlike plantings; this Church not eager for the fray, not precipitating herself with force irresistible upon this modern world to claim it, to love it, to foster and admire or to correct and cure, to own it for Christ, and with her impetuous arm to lift it to the very summit of its highest aspirations, to which only the Church’s aid this panting, hoping, despairing world can every reach! Far, far from Catholics be the chilling, fatal, un-Catholic thought!

I preach the new, the most glorious crusade. Church and age! Unite them in the name of humanity, in the name of God.

In the "name of humanity"? This could come straight from one of Jorge Mario Bergoglio's endless screeds against the Catholic Faith. Indeed, the conciliar "popes" have long spoken of a "new humanity," and the wreteched Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini/Paul the Sick did so with the same kind of glee as the man who was installed as a lay Jesuit presbyter during his false "pontificate," Jorge Mario Bergoglio:

All right, back to John Ireland:

Church and age! Bring them into close contact; they pulsate alike; the God of humanity works in one, the God of supernatural revelations works in the other–in both the self-same God.

The Characteristics of The Age--Its Ambition of Knowledge.

Let us note the chief characteristics of the age. The age is ambitious of knowledge. Its searchings take no rest and submit to no limitations of territory. Be it so. The Catholic Church proclaims that all truth, natural and supernatural, is from God, and that the mind, whose proper aliment is truth, grows more God-like as it absorbs truth in more generous proportions. Two sources of knowledge there are according to Catholic teaching, both from god,--the individual reason of man and the voice of God in revelation. Between reason and revelation there never can be a contradiction, the so-called war between Church and science being a war between the misrepresentations of science and the misrepresentations of faith, or rather between certain ignorant scientists and certain ignorant theologians. The Church desires the spread of intellectual light among all men and over all regions of truth; the age in its tireless studying of nature does the work of the Church. The discoveries of the age, whether in minute aminalcules or in vast fiery orbs, demonstrate God. They show forth through all the laws of the universe an absolute cause, all-wise, all-powerful, eternal, and this cause is God. The fruits of historical inquisitions, of all social and moral meditations, give us Christ rising from the dead and raising the world from the dead. They give us Christ's Church as the enduring embodiment of Christ's mission. The knowledge of the age! The age has not a sufficiency of it, and the need of the hour, the duty of the Church, is to urge the age to deeper researches, to more extensive surveyings, leaving untouched no particle of matter that may conceal a secret, no incident of history, no act in the life of humanity that may solve a problem. The knowledge of the age! the Church blesses it; the Church aids its onward growth with all her might, with all her light.

It Is An Age of Liberty--the Age of the Democracy.

It is an age of liberty, civil and political; it is the age of the democracy, when the whole people, tired of the unrestricted way of sovereigns, become themselves the sovereigns, become themselves the sovereigns, and exercise with more or less directness the power was always their primarily by divine ordinance. The age of the democracy! The Catholic Church, I am sure, has no fear of the democracy, this flowering of her own most sacred principles of the equality, fraternity, and liberty of all men, in Christ and through Christ. These principles are spread upon every page of the gospel. From the moment they were first confided to the Church they have been ceaselessly leavening minds and hearts towards the fullest recognition of rights and the dignity among all men, toward the elevation of the multitudes of men, and the enjoyment by them of freedom from unnecessary restrictions, of social happiness mingled with as few sorrows as earth's planet permits. The whole history of the Catholic Church is the record of the enfranchisement of the slave, the curbing of royal tyranny, the defence of the poor, of the people, of woman, of all the social entities that pride and passion choose to trample upon. The great theologians of the Church, an Aquinas, a Suarez, provide in their teachings complete foundations for the political democracy, which assumes in the presume age its plenary form. They assert and prove that all political power comes from God through the people, whose delegates kings and princes are, and that when rulers become tyrants the inalienable right of revolution is reserved to the people. The Church lives under all forms of government. When ratified by the people all forms of legitimate; but the government which more than another is that of the people, by the people, and for the people, is the one where the Church of the people, the Catholic Church, breathes air most congenial to her principles of her heart.

What amazing blasphemy. What heresy.

Archbishop John Ireland’s views are shared by the likes of Catholics such as those involved in the e-mail chain released by WikiLeaks and the kords of Modernism such as Ratzinger/Benedict and Bergoglio in the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

The sovereignty of the people? All political power comes from God through the people? This is a direct misrepresentation of Catholic teaching and it was a slap in the face to the reigning pope at the time that John Ireland preached this sermon, Pope Leo XIII, who wrote the following about the "sovereignty of the people" in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

The sovereignty of the people, however, and this without any reference to God, is held to reside in the multitude; which is doubtless a doctrine exceedingly well calculated to flatter and to inflame many passions, but which lacks all reasonable proof, and all power of insuring public safety and preserving order. Indeed, from the prevalence of this teaching, things have come to such a pass that may hold as an axiom of civil jurisprudence that seditions may be rightfully fostered. For the opinion prevails that princes are nothing more than delegates chosen to carry out the will of the people; whence it necessarily follows that all things are as changeable as the will of the people, so that risk of public disturbance is ever hanging over our heads.

To hold, therefore, that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice. And this is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name. Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God. (Pope Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885.)

John Ireland, you were busted in your day by Pope Leo XIII. You knew that this was the case. You did not care. As a proud American who set the stage for the plague represented by such people as those who think themselves fit to send e-mails about a “Catholic Spring” that has everything to do with Antichrist, not Christ the King.

Ireland’s speech continued with a praise of “social justice” and “material progress”:

It Is An Age of Social Justice; It is An Age of Material Progress

It is an age of social battlings for justice to all men, for the right of all men to live in the frugal comfort becoming rational creatures, to all of whom birth in the world gives them title of a sufficiency of the things of the world. Very well; is not this sudden revolution which has come upon men in the plea for social justice and social comfort the loud outburst of the cry which has ever been going forth from the bosom of the Church since the words were spoken by the Founder: "Seek first the king of God and His justice, and all things else should be added unto you"? It is not sufficiently made public that the principles underlying the social movement of the times in all its legitimate demands are the principles constantly taught in Catholic theological schools, as, for instance, this chief one proclaimed by the Cardinal Manning, to the horror of the aristocratic England, that in case of extreme need of food all goods become common property. Catholics have of late been so accustomed to lock up their teachings in temple and seminary that when the same teachings appear in active evolution upon the broad sea of humanity they do not recognize them; they even fear and disown them.

It is an age of material progress, of inventions, of the subjugation of nature's forces to the service of man, of the building up of the man over all irrational creatures. Does Church in these things condemn the age? It is her doctrines that the earth was given to man that he dominates over it. Progress of every kind the Church blesses; for progress along the lines of all human activities and human uses is the divine ordering,--stagnation and inactivity calling down from God reprobation, as we learn from the parable of the talents. (Archbishop John Ireland, A Sermon of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Episcopal Consecration of His Eminence James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. Full text found in The Voice of the Church, a book published by the Bishops of the United States of America in 1899, pp. 103-113. We were given this book by a friend of ours who believed that it would be of use in my work. It is a treasure of Americanism mixed in with various articles that are authentically Catholic. In other words, it was very representative of the state of confusion that existed in the minds of Catholics in the United States of America at the end of the Nineteenth Century, a state of confusion that has now been spread worldwide as a result of conciliarism's embrace of "the age.")

Well, I think it prudent, wise and necessary to call upon three popes named Pius at this juncture:

80. The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.- -Allocution "Jamdudum cernimus," March 18, 1861. (Pope Pius IX, The Syllabus of Errors, December 8, 1864.)

It is thus, Venerable Brethren, that for the Modernists, whether as authors or propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor, indeed, are they without forerunners in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our predecessor Pius IX wrote: 'These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts.' On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new. We find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX, where it is enunciated in these terms: ''Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason'; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: ''The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence also that sense of the sacred dogmas is to be perpetually retained which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth.' Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, barred by this pronouncement; on the contrary, it is supported and maintained. For the same Council continues: 'Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals, and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries -- but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.' (Pope Saint Pius X, Pascendi Dominci Gregis, September 8, 1907.)

Moreover they assert that when Catholic doctrine has been reduced to this condition, a way will be found to satisfy modern needs, that will permit of dogma being expressed also by the concepts of modern philosophy, whether of immanentism or idealism or existentialism or any other system. Some more audacious affirm that this can and must be done, because they hold that the mysteries of faith are never expressed by truly adequate concepts but only by approximate and ever changeable notions, in which the truth is to some extent expressed, but is necessarily distorted. Wherefore they do not consider it absurd, but altogether necessary,that theology should substitute new concepts in place of the old ones in keeping with the various philosophies which in the course of time it uses as its instruments, so that it should give human expression to divine truths in various ways which are even somewhat opposed, but still equivalent, as they say. They add that the history of dogmas consists in the reporting of the various forms in which revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded one another in accordance with the different teachings and opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries. (Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950.)

Those want to indemnify false teaching of the likes of John Ireland are, whether or not they realize it, in league the devil as it is he who desires Holy Mother Church to be adapted to an "age" that has been born and is now foundering as the direct consequences of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the subsequent rise of Judeo-Masonry that followed in its wake.

The world of Modernity is premised upon the lie that it is possible for men to be well-ordered in their own personal lives that they can live within the framework of well-ordered republics. To profess believe in Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ "personally" without acknowledging His Social Kingship over our nations is, to quote Louis-Edouard-François-Desiré Cardinal Pie, the Bishop of Poitiers, France, from 1849 to 1880, is to say that He is not God:

"If Jesus Christ," proclaims Msgr. Pie in a magnificent pastoral instruction, "if Jesus Christ Who is our light whereby we are drawn out of the seat of darkness and from the shadow of death, and Who has given to the world the treasure of truth and grace, if He has not enriched the world, I mean to say the social and political world itself, from the great evils which prevail in the heart of paganism, then it is to say that the work of Jesus Christ is not a divine work. Even more so: if the Gospel which would save men is incapable of procuring the actual progress of peoples, if the revealed light which is profitable to individuals is detrimental to society at large, if the scepter of Christ, sweet and beneficial to souls, and perhaps to families, is harmful and unacceptable for cities and empires; in other words, if Jesus Christ to whom the Prophets had promised and to Whom His Father had given the nations as a heritage, is not able to exercise His authority over them for it would be to their detriment and temporal disadvantage, it would have to be concluded that Jesus Christ is not God". . . .

"To say Jesus Christ is the God of individuals and of families, but not the God of peoples and of societies, is to say that He is not God. To say that Christianity is the law of individual man and is not the law of collective man, is to say that Christianity is not divine. To say that the Church is the judge of private morality, but has nothing to do with public and political morality, is to say that the Church is not divine."

In fine, Cardinal Pie insists:

"Christianity would not be divine if it were to have existence within individuals but not with regard to societies."

Fr. de St. Just asks, in conclusion:

"Could it be proven in clearer terms that social atheism conduces to individualistic atheism?". . . .

"Neither in His Person," Card, Pie said in a celebrated pastoral instruction, "nor in the exercise of His rights, can Jesus Christ be divided, dissolved, split up; in Him the distinction of natures and operations can never be separated or opposed; the divine cannot be incompatible to the human, nor the human to the divine. On the contrary, it is the peace, the drawing together, the reconciliation; it is the very character of union which has made the two things one: 'He is our peace, Who hat made both one. . .' (Eph. 2:14). This is why St. John told us: 'every spirit that dissolveth Jesus is not of God. And this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh: and is now already in the world' (1 John 4:3; cf. also 1 John 2:18, 22; 2 John: 7). "So then, Card. Pie continues, "when I hear certain talk being spread around, certain pithy statements (i.e., 'Separation of Church and State,' for one, and the enigmatic axiom 'A free Church in a free State,' for another) prevailing from day to day, and which are being introduced into the heart of societies, the dissolvent by which the world must perish, I utter this cry of alarm: Beware the Antichrist."

Fr. de St. Just adds:

"Accordingly, the Bishop of Poitiers had always fought against THE SEPARATION OF Church and State. Moreover, he opposed all separations, that of reason and faith, of nature and grace, of natural religion and revealed religion, the separation of the philosopher and the Christian, of private man and public man. He saw in all these [separations] a resurgence of Manichean dualism and he had fought all these with, the supreme argument, the law formed by Christ. Therefore, it is in all truth, writing to [Minister of the Interior] the Count of Presigny, that he could render this testimony:

'We have nothing in common with the theorists of disunion and opposition of two orders, temporal and spiritual, natural and supernatural. We struggle, on the contrary, with all our strength against these doctrines of separation which is leading to the denial of religion itself and of revealed religion.'"

Fr. de St. Just returns at this point and introduces us to what is perhaps Msgr. Pie's strongest language, with regard to this entire subject:

"To this doctrine of the Church, which Msgr. Pie brought to the mind of the rulers of nations, the liberals would oppose acts favoring separation.

"Certain countries, Belgium and America, for example, haven't they proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and doesn't the Church enjoy a more complete liberty under such a system?"

None other than Pope Saint Pius X used the writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers to help him explicate Catholic Social Teaching as a bishop in Mantua, Italy, and Venice, Italy, before he did so upon his elevation to the Throne of Saint Peter on August 3, 1903:

"[St.] Pius X, giving audience in the French seminary, declared to have 'often read and re-read' the works of Cardinal Pie . . . . This veneration of [St.] Pius X for the great Bishop of Poitiers is demonstrated for us by this account found in Canon [Paul] Vigue's 'Select Pages of Cardinal Pie': "A priest from Poitiers has recalled that one day he had the honor of having been introduced into the cabinet of the Supreme Pontiff, [St.] Pius X, in the company of a religious who was also from Poitiers. 'Oh! the diocese of Poitiers," the Holy Father exclaimed, raising his hands, when he heard the name Poitiers mentioned. "I have almost the entire works of your Cardinal,' the saintly Pontiff continued, 'and, for years, there has hardly been a day that I have not read some of its pages.' (Selected Writings of Selected Writings of Cardinal Pie of Poitiers, Catholic Action Resource Center, Orlando, Florida, October, 2007, testimonial pages.)

What was good enough for Pope Saint Pius X has been rejected by the conciliar revolutionaries. This means that the Catholic Church is not indefectible, that our true popes taught Catholicism in a “time-conditioned” manner, and that the teaching of the “past” had to be “corrected.” Wherewas the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, as this teaching was being promulgated? Did God the Holy Ghost “hide” this teaching from the eyes of our true popes until the “blinders” were lifted at the “Second” Vatican Council?

Preposterous.

Yet it is that, as noted most recently in part oneof this commentary, the contrary, our true popes have warned us of the dire consequences that would befall men if they and their nations endorsed the falsehoods of “liberty of conscience” and “religious liberty."

The astounding events unfolding before our very eyes are the result, proximately speaking, of living under the adversary's rules. Indeed, the advesary inspired the lecherous drunkard named Father Matin Luther, cheered on as he was by the Talmudists who happily spread his heretical tracts, to overthrow the Divine Plan that God Himself created to effect man's return to Him through His Catholic Church. Anyone who thinks that there is any kind of naturalist "solution" to the chaos in which we live is, in plain English, nuts. (Look, I will never live in New York again, and we have spent all of thirty hours there, driving time included, in nearly five years. However, New Yorkers are prone to say one another when they believe somone is wrong, "You're nuts.")

Our Lord has given us a way out of this chaos, and it runs through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

This is why Our Lady, acting at the behest of her Divine Son as she does not act on her own, appeared to Jacinta and Francisco Marto and Lucia dos Santos one hundred years ago tomorrow. Our Lady told them the following on July 13, 1917:

"I want you to come here on the 13th of next month, [August] to continue to pray the Rosary every day in honour of Our Lady of the Rosary, in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war, because only she can help you."

"Continue to come here every month. In October, I will tell you who I am and what I want, and I will perform a miracle for all to see and believe."

Lucia made some requests for sick people, to which Mary replied that she would cure some but not others, and that all must say the rosary to obtain such graces, before continuing: "Sacrifice yourselves for sinners, and say many times, especially when you make some sacrifice: O Jesus, it is for love of You, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary."

"You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father.

"To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world."

Mary specifically told Lucia not to tell anyone about the secret at this stage, apart from Francisco, before continuing: "When you pray the Rosary, say after each mystery: 'O my Jesus, forgive us, save us from the fire of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those who are most in need.' "

Lucia asked if there was anything more, and after assuring her that there was nothing more, Mary disappeared off into the distance. (Our Lady's WordsatFatima.)

Our Lady promised on July 13 1917, to return to request the consecration of Russia by the Holy Father. She came to visit Sister Lucia in Tuy, Spain, on June 13, 1929, to specify the terms of this consecration:

"The moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father, in union with all the Bishops in the world, to make the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means. There are so many souls whom the Justice of God condemns for sins committed against me, that I have come to ask reparation: sacrifice yourself for this intention and pray." (Our Lady's Words at Fatima.)

Our Lady herself said that “There are so many souls whom the Justice of God condemns for sins committed against” her, the Theotokos, “that I have come to ask for reparation.”

We must live more penitentially as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

We must accept the penances that Our Lord sends us as the means to make reparation for our own many sins, which have worsened the state of the Church Militant on earth and the state of the world at large far more than we want to understand or accept, and for those of the whole world. We may live in a world that observes the advesary's rules. We do not want ourselves or others to live under the adversary's grip for all etenrity in hell. We must make reparation for our sins and those of the world world.

We must realize that each cross that we are asked to bear has been specifically fashioned for by the loving hand of God from all eternity and that His own Most Blessed Mother will send us the graces to carry our crosses with joy, serenity and gratitude as the means by which we can give honor and glory to Him through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Our Rosaries will be more fruitful the more that we live in accord with the Fatima Message of penance and reparation.

Our Rosaries will provide consolations to us--and to others that we may only meet in eternity--if we ask Our Lady for the graces to meditate on the mysteris contained therein as we think of her indispensable role in the economy of salvation.

What a great love God has to give us such a Mother, our very own Blessed Mother, to help us erring sinners to save our souls and to view the world and everything in it exclusively thorugh the supernatural eyes of the Holy Faith.

We must also follow the examples of our saints, including Saints Nereus and Achelleus, who were ready to die for the Holy Faith because they had convinced Domatilla to consecrate herself entirely to God as a virgin, a state that Jorge Mario Bergoglio believes can be used an excuse for “selfishness.” Even these martyrs stand as a rebuke to the Argentine Apostate, a true "man of the world, the flesh and the devil," who does not believe that human beings can live “happy” and “fulfilled” lives without satisfying their passions in one form or another, and Saint Pancras stands as a rebuke to each of the conciliar “popes,” including Bergoglio, because he refused to offer sacrifice to false gods. The conciliar “popes” have gone out of their way to praise false religions and to state that their own false rites are pleasing to God. The lives of the martyrs speak to the contrary:

The brothers Nereus and Achilleus were eunuchs of Flavia Domitilla and were baptized by St. Peter at the same time as she herself and her mother Plautilla. Because they persuaded Domitilla to consecrate her virginity to God, they were accused of being Christians by Aurelian, who had been betrothed to her, and were sent to the island of Ponza. Soon afterwards, they were scourged in an effort to make them sacrifice to idols, and were taken to Terracina, where, after they had overcome the torture of the rack and flaming torches, they were beheaded. Their bodies were taken to Rome by their disciple Auspicius and buried on the Ardeatine Way. As for Flavia Domitilla, who had received the sacred veil of a virgin from Pope St. Clement, she also was deported to the island of Ponza, and after a long imprisonment was taken to Terracina. There, by the judge's orders, her dwelling was set on fire, and she won a glorious death, along with the virgins Theodora and Euphrosyna, her foster-sisters, on May 7, under Emperor Trajan. Their bodies were buried by the Deacon Caesarius. Pancras, born of a noble Phrygian family, was baptized in Rome at the age of fourteen. Under the Emperors Diocletian and Maximian, he was arrested; and when he firmly refused to sacrifice to the gods, he was beheaded and so won the glorious crown of martyrdom. His body was buried secretly on the Via Aurelia by the matron Octavilla. (Matins, The Divine Office, May 12.)

Just a little bit of a contrast with Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his crew of revolutionaries who have "reconciled with the age" and now celebrate it with abandon.

Yes, we must remember that Our Lady, who appeared to the three shepherd children on the day after the feast of Saints Nereus, Achilleus, Pancratius and Domatilla, is our sure refuge in the midst of the revolutions that shaped the world in which we live and have done so much damage to so many souls, including our own (as few of us have been immune to the ravages of the pestilences of Modernity and Modernism). We must make sure to pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permit, offering up all of our trials and tribulations of the moment to the Most Sacred Heart of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

Father Maximilian Mary Kolbe explained in "A Letter of Spiritual Direction to Brother Matthew" how much we must rely upon Our Lady:

"But if anything under any pretext, even that of a more elevated devotion, leads you away from our Lady, consider it as a sinister trap, even though it appears to you as the holiest of practices.

In her and through her we shall surely reach the Heart of Jesus, but without her (in the sense I explained above) everything is only a satanic illusion intended to lead souls to ruin. A fine illustration of this is the vision that our Father St. Francis had of the two ladders, one red and the other white, by which the friars were climbing to heaven.

[The Little Flowers of St. Francis, chapter 7: "How Bro. Leo saw a terrible vision in a dream." He saw the friars trying to reach paradise by means of a red ladder at the top of which was Jesus awaited them; but all of them, after mounting a few rungs, kept falling back to the ground. Then St. Francis encouraged the friars to climb up to heaven using a white ladder, on the top of which the most Blessed Virgin awaited them. "Without any trouble they entered into the eternal kingdom."

May the Immaculate always keep you closer and closer to her Immaculate Heart!

P. S. No matter what you find written in any wa yand anywhere, be sure that whoever belongs to the Immaculate will not be lost. The more he belongs to her the more will he belong to Jesus and to the Father. (Father Anselm W. Romb, O.F.M. Conv., ed., The Kolbe Reader, Franciscan Marytown Press, Libertyville, Illinois, 1987, pp. 145-146.)

We must belong to Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through His own Most Blessed Mother’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart during these times when civil and doctrinal and liturgical revolutionaries hold such sway with so many. Our Lady will enfold us under her loving mantle of her Brown Scapular as we make no concessions to conciliarism or the nonexistent legitimacy of the false shepherds who spread error in the name of the Catholic Church and who dishonor her by refusing to exhort one and all to go to her Divine Son through her Immaculate Heart, especially by means of her being tenderly devoted to the faithful, daily recitation of her Most Holy Rosary.

No matter the difficulties of the moment, we must remain steadfastly confident in our desire to live out the Catholic Faith without compromise as the consecrted slaves of Christ the King.

What are we waiting for?

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saints Nereus, Achelleus, Domatilla, and Pancratius, pray for us.

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